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Not every reconciliation failure originates inside the broker's operation. Sometimes the risk comes from outside, from a vendor change, a system update, or an integration breaking without warning. What separates the companies that absorb that risk quietly from the ones that catch and recover it is whether daily reconciliation is running.
This case study details how Reconbees detected a €93,000 currency crediting error within 24 hours of it occurring, caused by a PSP API upgrade that was never communicated to the broker.
The Context
A Seychelles-based forex broker, FSA-regulated, had been processing payments through the same PSP for years without issue. It’s safe to say they had a long-term relationship with this PSP, their integration was stable, and the broker had no reason to expect a problem.
Then the PSP upgraded their API, without notifying the broker. This then resulted in a series of unfortunate events that couldn’t be predicted, but could have been avoided.
The broker's systems were not updated in time. The integration broke, but not in an obvious way; payments continued to be processed, clients continued to deposit, and the system appeared to be working.
The Problem
What was actually happening: clients depositing in Indonesian Rupiah (IDR) were being credited to their trading accounts at a 1:1000 rate, rather than the actual exchange rate.
(For example, a client depositing 1,000,000 IDR, worth approximately €49, was being credited €1,000).
The scale of the discrepancy was enormous, and it was happening across every IDR deposit and withdrawal being processed. Before anyone caught it, some clients had already noticed the inflated balances and submitted withdrawal requests without placing any trades.
70 clients. 100 deposits. €93,000 in potential losses, created overnight.
Reconbees Intervention
Reconbees' daily reconciliation process flagged the transaction mismatch the following day.
Within 24 hours of the issue occurring, Reconbees had:
- Identified the discrepancy through the reconciliation process and pinpointed its source
- Mapped every affected transaction and client account
- Immediately alerted the broker's management team and explained the root cause
- Recommended freezing trading activity on all affected accounts
- Recommended temporarily disabling the IDR payment method to prevent further exposure
- Coordinated the recovery of the majority of funds that had already been withdrawn
- Verified that all incorrect credits were corrected once the API integration was restored
- Confirmed reconciliation was clean before the payment method was reinstated
The Impact
Total potential loss: €93,000 (in under 24 hours)
Amount recovered: €90,000 (97% recovery rate)
Clients affected: 70, across 100 deposits.
The speed of detection was decisive. The error had occurred overnight. It was caught the next morning. The window was narrow enough that the majority of funds, including those already withdrawn, could be recovered through coordinated action.
Had the reconciliation process been weekly or monthly rather than daily, the same error would have been discovered far later, with exponentially more affected transactions, more withdrawn funds, and a significantly smaller proportion recoverable.
The broker was not at fault, as there was no internal processing failure. And what protected the broker was the reconciliation layer, a daily process that compared what was actually happening in their systems against what should be happening, and flagged the gap within 24 hours.
For any forex broker processing payments across multiple currencies and PSPs, the question is not whether an external system will change unexpectedly. It will. The question is how quickly you find out when it does.
If your operation processes payments across multiple currencies or payment providers, daily reconciliation is the control that catches what your internal systems cannot.
Book a free consultation with Reconbees, and find out what your current process would and wouldn't catch.
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